he experienced in himself
the transitory life's illusions. To Watts, the serious man of fifty
years, Love and Death, Faith and Hope, Aspiration, Suffering, and
Remorse, were not, as to the eighteenth-century rhymester, merely Greek
ladies draped in flowing raiment; to him they were realities, intensely
focussed in himself. Watts was giving of himself, of his knowledge and
observation of what Love is and does, and how Death appears so
variously; and who but a man who knew the melancholy of despair could
paint that picture "Hope"?

Immediately after the central crisis of his personal life appeared the
canvas entitled "Fata Morgana," illustrative of a knight in vain pursuit
of a phantom maiden; and before long there was from his brush the
pictured story of a lost love, "Orpheus and Eurydice," one of the
saddest of all myths, but, one feels, no old myth to him.

By a more careful analysis of the artist's work we hope to learn the
teaching Watts set himself to give, and to ascertain the means that he
adopted; but one point needs to be made clear at this stage, namely,
that although Watts was a great teacher, yet he was not a revolutionary.
The ideals he held up were not new or strange, but old, well-tried, one
might almost say conventional. They represent the ideals which, in the
friction and turmoil of ages, have emerged as definite, clear, final.
They are not disputed or dubious notions, but accepted truisms forgotten
and neglected, waiting for the day when men shall live by them.

Furthermore, Watts was not in any sense a mystic--neither personally or
as an artist. "The Dweller in the Innermost" is not the transcendental
self known to a few rare souls, but is merely conscience, known to all.
The biblical paintings have no secret meaning assigned to them. The
inhabitants of Eden, the hero of the Deluge, the Hebrew patriarchs,
Samson and Satan--all these are the familiar figures of the
evangelical's Bible. "Eve Repentant" is the woman Eve, the mother of the
race; "Jacob and Esau" are the brothers come to reconciliation; "Jonah"
is the prophet denouncing the Nineveh of his day and the Babylon of
this. The teaching--and there is teaching in every one of them--is plain
and ethical. So also, with the Greek myths; they teach plainly--they
hold no esoteric interpretations. Watts is no Neo-Platonist weaving
mystical doctrines from the ancient hero tales; he is rather a stoic, a
moralist, a teacher of earthly things.

But we m